What If They Had a Baseball Game and Nobody Watched?

It ain’t easy for a professional sports event to get a TV rating of 0.0, so kudos to the Houston Astros for accomplishing the feat.

The Houston Astros keep breaking records for the wrong reasons.This past Sunday according to Nielson ratings, the Astros and Indians game drew a rating of 0.0 in the greater Houston area.

To be fair, it should be noted that the rating does not mean that nobody watched the game. TV ratings are similar to political polls in that they project from a sample and therefore have a margin of error. So it’s quite likely that somewhere in the Houston metro area (population 6.2 mil) somebody was watching. But not a lot of somebodies.

When a special event happens, there’s usually some special cause; but in this case the special cause was not that big a deal – the Houston Texans (NFL) had a game on TV at the same time (recently, when there was a college football game on TV involving Texas A&M, the Astros got a rating of 0.04).

Other than that, the cause is that the Astros suck. They went into the game with eight consecutive losses and 104 for the season (afterwards, they had 105 for the season and nine consecutive). They also are shown on a crappy network apparently, but 0.0 ratings aren’t likely to elicit offers from anybody better.